She shifted, her flat bumping against my shoe. “Connection,” she said. “Right.”
In fact, I was feeling connection right now. I liked talking religion with her; I liked that she got it, got it in a way that a lot of lifetime churchgoers didn’t. I wanted to talk to her all day, listen to her all day, have her breathy words whisper me to sleep at night…
Noooooo, Tyler. Bad.
I cleared my throat. “What can I help you with, Poppy?”
She held up the church newsletter. “I saw that there was a pancake breakfast tomorrow and I wanted to help.”
“Of course.” The breakfast was one of the first things I’d started doing after coming to St. Margaret’s, and the response had been overwhelming. There was enough rural poverty and poverty in nearby Platte City and Leavenworth to guarantee a steady need for the service, but there were never enough volunteers and we were slammed the two times a month we hosted it. “That would be so much appreciated.”
“Good.” She smiled, the hint of a dimple appearing in her cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
I prayed extra last night. I woke up at dawn and went on an even longer run than the ones I’d been taking, crashing into my kitchen sweaty and exhausted, causing a casserole-unloading Millie to tsk at me.
“Are you training for a marathon?” she asked. “If so, it doesn’t look like you’re doing a very good job.”
I was too out of breath to even sputter a protest at that. I grabbed a bottle of water and drank the entire thing in several long gulps. Then I stretched out facedown on the cold tile floor in an attempt to lower my core temperature.
“You do realize it’s dangerous to run in the heat, even in the morning. You should get a treadmill.”
“Mmphm,” I said into the floor.
“Well, regardless, you need to shower before the breakfast. I ran into that delightful new girl last night in town, and she said she was going to help us today. And surely you want to look nice for the new girl, right?”
I lifted my head and looked up at her incredulously.
She dug the toe of her purple pump into my ribs before stepping easily over me. “I’m going to the church now to help them mix the batter. I’ll be sure to help Miss Danforth get settled if I see her before you get there.”
She left and I peeled myself off the floor, taking a minute to clean the sweaty torso-print with paper towels and a cleaning spray. And then I went back and showered.
It ended up being surprisingly easy to stay focused at the breakfast itself. It was so busy, and I tried to make a point to sit down at every table over the course of the morning and get to know the people who visited. Some had children who I could send home with backpacks stuffed with school supplies and peanut butter, some had elderly parents I could refer to local eldercare services and charities. Some just were lonely and wanted someone to talk to—and I could do that too.
But every so often, I’d see Poppy out of the corner of my eye, smiling at a guest or bringing a fresh stack of trays out, and it was hard not to notice how at home she looked in this environment. She was genuinely kind to the visitors, but she was also efficient, focused and able to ladle scrambled eggs at a rate that made Millie declare her an honorary granddaughter. She seemed so at peace, so unlike the troubled woman who had confessed her sins to me.
I ended the morning batter-splashed (it was my job to carry the giant bowls of batter over to the stove) and finger-burned (ditto with cooking the bacon) and happy. While I probably wouldn’t see any of these people at Mass anytime soon, I would see them again two weeks from now, and that was the important thing—it was about filling bellies, not winning souls.
I told Millie and the other two grandmothers to go home and rest while I cleaned up, not seeing Poppy and assuming she’d already left. I hummed as I folded up the tables and stacked the chairs, and as I wheeled the mop bucket out onto the floor.
“How can I help?”
Poppy was at the foot of the stairs, tucking a piece of paper back into her purse. Even in the dim basement light, she looked unreal, too rare and too lovely to gaze at for longer than a few seconds without pain.
“I thought you’d left?” I said, moving my gaze back to the very safe mop and bucket in front of me.
“I went up with a family earlier—I heard the mother mention some issues with late taxes and since I’m a CPA, I offered to help.”
“That was really generous of you,” I said, again feeling that frantic, squeezing feeling that I’d felt yesterday, that feeling like I was losing my footing with her and starting to flirt with something much worse than pure lust.
“Why are you surprised that I did something nice?” she asked, stepping toward me. The words teased and joked, but the subtext was clear. Don’t you think I’m a good person?
I immediately felt defensive. I always assumed the best of people, always. But I guess I was a little surprised at the depth of her earnestness to help—I had been when she’d told me about Haiti too.
“Is it because you think I’m some sort of fallen woman?”
I dropped the mop in the bucket and looked up. She was closer now, close enough that I could see where a small cloud of flour had settled on her shoulder.
“I don’t think you’re a fallen woman,” I said.
“But now you are going to say that we are all fallen sinners in a fallen world.”
“No,” I pronounced carefully. “I was going to say that people who are as smart and attractive as you don’t typically have to cultivate skills like kindness unless they want to. Yes, it surprises me a little.”
“You’re smart and attractive,” she pointed out.
I flashed her a grin.
“Stop it, Father, I’m being serious. Are you sure that it isn’t because I’m a smart, attractive, advantaged woman that you don’t feel that way?”
What? No! I had been one class short of a Women’s Studies minor in college! “I—”
She took another step forward. Only the mop bucket was in between us now, but the bucket couldn’t stop me from noticing the elegant curve of her collarbone under her sundress, the faintest suggestion of cleavage before the bodice began.
“I want to be a good person, but more than that, I want to be a good woman. Is there no way to be both completely woman and completely good?”
Shit. This conversation had gone from taxes to the darkest corners of Catholic theology. “Of course, there is, Poppy, to the extent that anyone can be completely good,” I said. “Forget the Eve and the apple stuff right now. See yourself as I see you—an openly loved daughter of God.”
“I guess I don’t feel so loved.”
“Look at me.”
She did.
“You are loved,” I said firmly. “Smart, attractive woman that you are—every part of you, good and bad, is loved. And please ignore me if I fuck up and make you feel any differently, okay?”
She snorted at my swearing and then gave me a rueful grin. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I didn’t mean to corner you like that.”
“You didn’t corner me. Really, I’m the one who’s sorry.”
She took a step back, like she was physically hesitating about telling me what she was about to say. Finally she said, “Sterling called me last night. I think…I guess I maybe let it fuck with my head.”
“Sterling called you?” I asked, feeling an irritation that was way beyond the scope of professional concern.
“I didn’t answer, but he left a voicemail. I should have deleted it, but I didn’t…” She trailed off. “He repeated all those things he’d said before—about the kind of woman I am, where I was meant to be. He said he’s coming for me again.”
“He’s coming for you? He said that?”
She nodded and red rage danced at the edge of my vision.
Poppy evidently saw this, because she laughed and put her fingers over mine, where they’d been gripping the mop handle so tightly that my knuckles had turned white. “Relax, Father. He’ll come here, try to woo me with more stories about vacations and vintage wine and I’ll reject him. Again.”
Again…so like last time? Where you let him make you come before you made him leave?
“I don’t like this,” I said, and I said it not as a priest or a friend but as the man who had tasted her just one flight of stairs away from here. “I don’t want you to meet with him.”
Her smile stayed but her eyes changed into cold shards of green and brown. I suddenly appreciated what a weapon she would have made in a boardroom or on the arm of a senator. “Honestly? I don’t think it’s any of your business if I do meet with him or not.”
“He’s dangerous, Poppy.”
“You don’t even know him,” she said, removing her hand from mine.
“But I know how dangerous a man can be when he wants a woman he can’t have.”
“Like you?” she said, and the mark was so ruthlessly and perfectly aimed that I nearly staggered back.
The weight of the overtones collapsed onto us like a rotten ceiling—Poppy and Sterling, yes, but Poppy and me, my childhood priest and Lizzy.
Men wanting what they shouldn’t: the story of my life.
Without another word, Poppy turned and left, her strappy sandals clacking on the stairs. I forced myself to take several deep breaths and try to figure out what the fuck had just happened.
CHAPTER 9
Knock.
Knock.
Pause.
Knock knock knock.
“Stop,” I muttered, rolling out of bed, sleep making me slow and fumbling. “I’m coming, I’m coming.”
Knock knock BOOM.
The deafening thunder and preceding flash of light did nothing to alleviate my disorientation, and I stumbled into the table, the sharp corner burrowing into my hip. I swore, blindly reaching for a t-shirt (I was only in a loose pair of sweatpants) and groped my way down the hall to the living room where the front door was. I was just awake enough that I was beginning to register that someone really was at my door at three in the morning, and it was either a police officer coming to tell me that Ryan had finally rammed his car into a tree while texting or one of the parishioners needing last rites. Whatever reason they had for coming to the rectory, it probably wasn’t good, and I steeled myself for tragedy as I opened the door, awkwardly also trying to tug my t-shirt over my head.
It was Poppy, rain-soaked with a bottle of Scotch in her hand.
I blinked like an idiot. For one thing, after our fight this morning, the literal last thing I expected was Poppy at my door in the middle of the night bearing gifts. For another, she was wearing what I assumed were her pajamas—a pair of dancing shorts and a thin Walking Dead t-shirt—and the rain had thoroughly wetted both. She wasn’t wearing a bra and the rain had made her thin shirt almost transparent, her nipples dark and hard under the fabric, and once I noticed that, it was hard to think about anything else than those wet breasts, probably pebbled with goose bumps, and how that cool flesh would feel against my hot tongue.
And then I came back to myself and for a terrible moment, I warred between two impulses: shutting her out into the rain or shoving her to her knees and making her swallow my cock.
Flee the temptations of youth, we’d read at the Bible study earlier tonight. Pursue righteousness. I should shut the door and go back to bed. But then Poppy shivered, and a lifetime of respect and politeness intervened. I found myself stepping back and gesturing for her to come inside.
Pursue righteousness, the author of Timothy said. But did righteousness carry a bottle of Macallan 12 in her hand? Because Poppy did.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, stepping into the living room and then turning around to face me.
I shut the door. “I gathered.” My voice was gravelly from sleep and something less innocent. Predictably, my dick started to swell; despite everything that had happened, I hadn’t seen her breasts yet, and they were more tempting than ever under that wet shirt.
Fuck. I didn’t mean yet. I meant never. I was never going to see her breasts. Accept it, I mentally chastised my groin, which refused to heel, and instead kept sending these painfully vivid sense memories back to my brain, like how it had felt to grope Poppy’s tits when she was bent over the church piano.
Her eyes dropped to my hips, and I knew my sweatpants were not doing a very good job hiding my thoughts. Clearing my throat, I turned away from her to walk over to the kitchen. “I didn’t know you liked The Walking Dead,” I mentioned lightly, sliding my hand over the switch. A pale yellow glow wafted from the postwar-era light fixture, casting angled shadows into the living room.
“It’s my favorite show,” Poppy said. “But I don’t know why you act surprised that you didn’t know. We haven’t known each other that long, and most of our conversations have involved me telling you my darkest secrets—not what’s on my Netflix queue.”